THE NATION

THE NATION; So Much for Assumptions About Immigrants and Jobs

By PETER PASSELL

Published: April 15, 1990

MOST Americans, it is safe to say, would be worse off without all the immigrants who iron their shirts, grill their hamburgers and staff their hospitals.

The catch, many suspect, is that immigrants compete with the least-skilled native-born workers, taking away their jobs or lowering their wages. That is why organized labor has long fought for tougher controls on immigration - and why House Democrats want to force employers to pay premium wages to foreign workers they sponsor under the liberalized immigration rules now being debated in Congress.

But new research suggests that immigrants are a virtually unmixed blessing. It shows that recent arrivals - legal and illegal - have had slight impact on the earnings or employment prospects of American residents. Immigrants, it seems, are either doing jobs that the American-born do not want, or they are filling slots in an economy with a nearly insatiable hunger for willing workers.

Comfort to Unions

During the 1980's, legal immigration averaged about 575,000 annually. This figure is double the rate of the mid-1960's, with the increase coming from poor countries in Latin America, Asia and the Caribbean. Yet annual immigration remains well below the million-plus surges after the turn of the century, when the economy was much smaller.

This comparison, however, is of modest comfort to unions that see immigrants as direct competitors for Americans' jobs - particularly those at the low end of the wage scale. Organized labor strongly backed efforts to curb illegal immigration in the 1980's. And it is behind efforts in the House to link any increase in legal entry to rules requiring employers to pay immigrant workers at least 105 percent of ''prevailing wages,'' for which the union scale typically figures as a floor.

Economists have generally assumed that labor perceived its interests correctly, says George Borjas, an economist at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the author of ''Friends or Strangers, The Impact of Immigrants on the U.S. Economy'' (Basic Books, 1990). Although unskilled immigrants who pick vegetables or make beds undoubtedly enhance the living standards of middle- and upper-income Americans, the working poor have more basic concerns than cheap tomatoes or reliable housekeepers. Bring in, say, 50,000 immigrants from Mexico eager to work on California farms, and one would expect to see wages fall and unemployment rise.

Yet a variety of econometric studies have failed to prove this, Professor Borjas said. Most of the studies draw on comparisons between cities with varying proportions of immigrants in the labor force. After adjusting for other factors that would affect relative wages - housing costs, for example - the researchers discovered that differences in immigrant populations accounted for only trivial differences in labor-market conditions.

These numbers do not, of course, include estimates of illegal immigration; no estimates of illegal populations are reliable.

But since illegal immigrants almost certainly congregate in the same cities as legal immigrants the results of the econometric studies are still valid. Indeed, the results are all the more dramatic; large populations of illegal immigrants apparently do not affect wages or employment opportunities.

Closing a Loophole

A 10 percent increase in immigrant labor, Professor Borjas estimated, reduces the average wage of natives by a mere 0.2 percent. There is no observed effect whatsoever on overall unemployment rates. Employment opportunities apparently expand rapidly enough to absorb new arrivals with hardly a blip.

Such ''cross-section'' snapshots comparing labor markets at a single moment do leave a conceptual loophole wide enough to accommodate the skeptics.

The data, argues Richard Freeman, a labor economist at Harvard University, are also consistent with the possibility that the continuing flow of immigrants deters native Americans from moving to where the better jobs are. If, for example, Mexicans and Chinese immigrants had not arrived to work in Los Angeles's garment industry, the unemployed Americans now languishing in the economic backwaters of Mississipi and Louisiana might have made the trek West.

One study just published, however, appears to close this loophole. During the Mariel boatlift of 1980, some 125,000 Cubans, half of whom had never attended high school, were dumped in Florida over a six-month period. Yet, ''nothing much seemed to happen to Miami, even to unskilled native blacks,'' said David Card, a labor economist at Princeton University. In spite of a 7 percent increase in the work force, wages rose slightly faster in Miami the following year than in a control group consisting of four other Sunbelt cities. Unemployment rates among Miami Cubans did increase from 7.2 to 10.1 percent, but the burden was borne almost exclusively by the Mariel refugees themselves.

Econometricians are not about to lay to rest every objection to immigration. Indeed some, like Profesor Borjas, fear that less-skilled, less-educated immigrants from the Third World will remain cut off from greater American culture, raising the toll of poverty and racism.

But the conventional economic wisdom pitting American poor against the immigrant poor is crumbling. So too, perhaps, will the conventional political wisdom pitting labor against the outsiders.